“Time for government – not nursing homes – to shoulder collective COVID-19 blame”

“Time for government – not nursing homes – to shoulder collective COVID-19 blame,” by Brendan Williams, McKnight’s LTC News

Quote:  “[W]e have seen the nursing home care sector suffer decades of governmental neglect that, inexorably, contributed to the tragedy inflicted by COVID-19. That neglect has not just manifested itself in the failure of governmental Medicaid reimbursement to keep facilities modern for the many residents for whom the government is the payor. This failure alone led to outmoded facilities being especially susceptible to respiratory virus spread due to shared rooms and cramped communal spaces. Nor has that neglect been limited to suppressing the economic mobility of nursing home staff through Medicaid parsimony that squeezes the compensation of a workforce that is overwhelmingly comprised of women. No, the culmination of that neglect was a willful disregard for the well-being of nursing home residents and staff during a pandemic especially lethal in a congregate care setting. … No one can dispute that nursing home providers should be accountable for neglect. Yet, every time a provider gets into trouble, contrast the collective blame imputed to more than 15,000 nursing homes to the impunity with which politicians can mistreat their state’s most vulnerable wards. And with what repercussions?”

LTC Comment, Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform:

Irony or hypocrisy? This author bashes Medicaid LTC appropriately but elsewhere attacks private LTC insurance and dismisses private market solutions to the problems he raises. He should look to the history of government funding and regulation of long-term care and realize those are the intrinsic cause that will not change. So his approach of demanding more Medicaid funding is not a solution, but rather more of what created the problems he laments.